As AI agents connect to more services—Slack, GitHub, Jira, MCP servers—tool libraries grow rapidly. A typical multi-server setup can easily have 50+ tools consuming 55,000+ tokens before any conversation starts. Worse, tool selection accuracy degrades when models face 30+ similarly-named tools.

The Tool Search Tool pattern, pioneered by Anthropic, addresses this: instead of loading all tool definitions upfront, the model discovers tools on-demand. It receives only a search tool initially, queries for capabilities when needed, and gets relevant tool definitions expanded into context. This achieves significant token savings while…

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! I am in lovely New Jersey, the Garden State, as I write this and I spent most of the last week in New Orleans. It's been a busy week in the Spring community and beyond and so you know what that means? There's a ton of stuff to look into! Let's dive right into it!

• Spring gRPC 1.0.0 is now GA! Huzzah! Hooray!
• Want to learn more about the new release direct from the Spring team? Join them, live, for this webinar on the 11th.
• Good news, everybody, Spring Shell 4.0.0-M2 is available now!.
• Spring AI 1.1.1 is available now.
• I really enjoyed this discussion with fellow Spring Developer Advocate Dan Vega on his new book The Fundamentals of Software Engineering, and you can too.
• Did you see this amazing Kotlin DSL for HTMX, called KHTMX?
• Speaking of Kotlin, have you started your journey with this amazing language? Check out this guide on the Spring portal.
• While not strictly speaking related to Spring, I think this article on Idempotency Keys - a very useful design philosophy and pattern - by fellow Java Champion Gunnar Morling is well-worth a read if you care about building reliable distributed systems architectures…

Hi, Spring fans! I'm so excited to chat with fellow Spring developer advocate Dan Vega about his new book, Fundamentals of Software Engineering

There is no doubt that AI-based coding assistants are already or will be widely used by developers and within organizations. While the overall outlook is pretty certain, the exact way when and how to use those tools might vary, ranging from extensions for existing IDEs (e.g. Copilot for Visual Studio Code) to entirely AI-focused environments (e.g. Cursor) or pure command-line interfaces (e.g. Claude Code).

The upcoming new major version 5 of the Spring Tools is ready for this new era in two different dimensions:

• we make sure that you can install and use the Spring Tools in as many AI-extended or AI-focused environments as possible, enhancing your AI-powered developer experience with the traditional Spring support that the Spring Tools bring to the table (ranging from specific validations, quick fixes, quick navigation and understanding, and more).
• we integrate the Spring Tools with the surrounding AI-powered environment to improve the AI coding experience itself.
…

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. By mistake, I inadvertently published older content in this installment, then tried to fix it and ended up re-publishing the same content. And, what's worse, I somehow ended up deleting the draft I had written for this installment — the one I intended to copy in to override the bad content. Ugh. A comedy of errors. Anyway, this is a lesson in why you should make sure you get enough sleep. And this is why I am now re-writing the same content again!

So, without any further ado, here finally is this week's roundup!

• this is an exciting look at the next generation of the Spring Tools projects
• in last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to Spring and Java community legend Simon Martinelli
• Spring Cloud 2025.1.0 has been released
• even more awesome stuff on the Spring Data AOT repository support
• I love this article from Spring Modulith founder Oliver Drotbohm on rethinking Spring Application Integration Testing
• How cool is this? Spring AI is at AWS re:Invent!
• want to learn more about the amazing new stuff in Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4?…

When working on Spring projects, developers do not only think in terms of low-level concepts like classes and interfaces. When using Spring, you think about higher-level abstractions and concepts like services, repositories, configuration classes, entities, aggregate roots, and so on. To bring these concepts front and center for developers in their coding environments, the Spring Tools analyzes your source code from a Spring perspective and provides overviews and quick navigation based on those concepts - and we have done that for a long time already.

In the past, we did this using the “Go To Symbol” functionality. The Spring Tools created specialized symbols for those Spring concepts by analyzing the source code and extracting the necessary information. That resulted, for example, in symbols being created for request mappings that all looked like /greeting – GET…

Hi, Spring fans! Happy Thanksgiving from me, and I am sure the entire Spring team, to you! We are, it should be clear, oh so very grateful.. thankful.. for you, the community. This week it is my great pleasure to chat with Spring community legend Simon Martinelli.

Concluding the Road to GA blog post series, let's explore benefits of Spring Data AOT Repositories.

Back in May 2025, we first introduced Ahead of Time (AOT) repositories as a preview feature for JPA and MongoDB with the 3rd Milestone of the next Spring Data generation. This feature, in short, uses AOT processing to implement your repository query methods using actual source code by relying on the store-specific nature of the repository.

Since then, we've incorporated feedback, ironed out rough edges, and onboarded two more modules: Apache Cassandra and JDBC. This means, with the 2025.1.0 release, you are be able to use AOT generated repositories with four Spring Data…

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another illustrious installment of This Week in Spring! It’s Thanksgiving week here in the United States. Thanksgiving is traditionally celebrated with friends and family every fourth Thursday of November, gathered around a table full of food and, usually, a giant stuffed turkey. When celebrated well, it’s a time to come together and revel in gratitude for life’s good fortunes. And so, in that spirit, my friends, I want to remind you — and I’m sure I can speak for the entire Spring team here, too! — that we are so grateful for you. The community is the most amazing…